


The Fox and the Wolf

by TextbookEnigmatic



Category: Doctor Who (2005), Supernatural
Genre: "What if...", Angst, F/F, F/M, M/M, Normal Winchesters, Parallel Universes, background ships
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-10
Updated: 2014-01-19
Packaged: 2018-01-08 05:13:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1128740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TextbookEnigmatic/pseuds/TextbookEnigmatic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam Winchester is plagued with nightmares of a world that could have been.  The Doctor has crash-landed, alone, in a parallel universe where nothing is as it should be.  The TARDIS is stolen, an old enemy returns, and Sam's ex-wife is a vicious demon bent on revenge.  In order to save the Doctor and fix the past, Sam must come to terms with the fact that his sleepy, suburban life is all a lie, and that the real world is much closer to the dangerous wasteland of his dreams–-a wasteland where he is forever running from from monsters he never knew existed at all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Biographies in the Garden

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! New fic here.  
> Enjoy, you magical person you.

“He kissed her hand and then he found out her name,

It's Death and now he can't seem to wake.

You can't run with the foxes and yet hunt with the wolf”

\- “The Fox and the Wolf” // Bring Me The Horizon

 

PROLOGUE

Sam Winchester knew he was wrong. He didn’t know how, or why, but he knew it. Inside him, like a burrowing worm in the meal of his bones. He was not meant to be.

He tried to tell Ruby, when she was around. She’d looked up from painting her nails, wine stains on her favorite dress, and given him a tepid sneer.

“Should’ve told me that before I married you,” she had said. “And maybe before I slept with your boss.”

He tried to tell his father, after the divorce. John Winchester had looked around, squinted at one of the certificates on Sam’s office wall, sighed.

“To be honest,” he had said, flicking dust off of an old soccer trophy. “You were always a bit off.”

He didn’t even try to tell Dean. Dean with his car and his drinking. Dean with his girlfriend-a-minute and his refusal to call Sam, even now. No, he didn’t think he’d ever try to tell Dean.

So Sam Winchester knew he was wrong, but he pretended he was right. He bought an apartment over his law firm office, decorated it with things he didn’t remember buying. He got a dog, named her Jess (he didn’t know why). He went on first dates and watched TV by himself, in the dark. He put the idea so far out of his head that he was thoroughly surprised when his mother and his father died under suddenly, in a car accident, and he found himself stuffed in a stiff suit next to Dean, staring numbly into their dark graves. Because that one thing, that felt right. The rain sliding down his collar and over his spine as he tossed a flower, a handful of dirt. His tongue heavy with words he could not speak. Dean beside him, hard-eyed and icy.

That alone felt right and it terrified him.

…

CHAPTER ONE:

 

There is a crossroad just East of the dog park. It branches quietly into suburbia, and sometimes Sam Winchester sees it in his dreams.

He can’t explain it. It sits cold and silent in his head like an insolent virus. A dry paper bag caught on the end of a sewage pipe blows across the beaten cement. Somewhere, a car stalls and restarts, but the crossroad is mostly silent. He sees nothing but the street and the bruised purple sky and he does not know why.

On some days he wakes up with the edges of a story in his mind. Someone had been to that crossroads, buried their picture there and waited for a demon. He wakes up with the taste of sulfur and unfamiliar blood in his mouth and a stranger’s thoughts in his head. Brings the covers from his sweaty skin and leaves the dream there in the darkness, while he stumbles back into the real world.

And sometimes the dream follows him out. He’ll leave the courthouse in a pressed black suit, lunch on his mind, and for an instant he’ll see something out of the corner of his eye. An antique car, low-riding and square, parked outside a graveyard fence. His father’s old hunting rifle, firing soundlessly into a busy street. Once it was a stranger’s eyes, suddenly ink-black and cruel. But then Sam will blink and it will all be gone.

His doctor said it was paranoid type schizophrenia, enforced by the trauma of his parent’s recent death. “Easily curable,” the balding man had said, with a watery smile. “easily fixed”. A few antipsychotics and he was on his way.

Dean said it was ridiculous. He had been staying in Sam’s spare bedroom since the funeral, a year of barely speaking and uncomfortable silences over heated-up Chinese takeout. They hadn’t even bothered to set up a real bed–Dean slept sideways on the cramped sofa there, a comforter and a stained pillow to keep him warm. Once or twice he would wake Sam with a shake.

“You’re talkin’ your sleep,” he’d mutter, eyes damp with old worry. “Thought you might wanna wake up.”

Sam saw the crossroads and he saw the black-eyes and he saw quiet flames over an open grave every now and then, but he saw nothing as much as he saw the blue box. It was everywhere he went. Looming in the frozen section of the supermarket, hiding behind the courthouse’s broad white pillars. Bright, battered blue wood, with a set of lit windows and a little white sign on the door that was always too far away for Sam to read.

It should have driven him mad, he supposed, as he showered and ate cereal and watched football games on his flat-screen apartment TV. It should have made him crazy with questions. 

Instead, the blue box faded like an old stain, a commonplace, a standstill. The crossroads were only in his dreams. The black-eyes a trick of the light, the car a sudden bout of misplaced and confusing nostalgia. Sam Winchester was good at forgetting. So Sam Winchester forgot.

Until the day that box crashed loudly into his garden on a Sunday afternoon, spraying red-brown dirt and dead flowers over his back porch with a screeching, mechanical moan.

That was something Sam found a little harder to forget.

…

“What…” Sam dropped his still-full coffee mug onto the counter with barely a glance, tugging on a pair of old rain boots and tumbling down the weathered stairs. He smacked through the screen door, his footfalls heavy and loud in the silent garden.

There it was. Small, rectangular, tumbled onto it’s side. A blue Sam could only describe as...very blue. He stood there on the porch, hand reaching blindly for the railing, mouth gaped open. The box had skidded nearly ten feet from the white-washed back fence, digging a shallow trench in which Sam’s sad attempt at a vegetable garden lay dead and trampled. There was a plume of oddly colored smoke rising from the doors, which had turned to face the sky. 

Sam took a tentative step forward. He could nearly hear a faint humming over the hiss of the smoke, and what sounded like distant waves, which must have been impossible. He felt Jess’ cold nose bump his palm, and he gave a yelp, jumping.

“Jesus, Jess!” He patted her ears distractedly, not taking his eyes off of that impossible box. Where could it have possibly crashed from? There was no chance a plane had cargo this large, and even if it did, there were no smoke trail or jet ruins nearby as far as Sam could tell. So where? The box, it seemed, had simply landed. Skidded gracelessly into existence smack-dab in the middle of his back garden.

Sam picked his way carefully through the ruined crops, feeling slightly ridiculous in the flowered rain boots. Jess trotted behind him, and her panting breath sounded startlingly normal and calm next to his own. 

Slowly, he reached out a hand. What if it’s radioactive? The thought flew momentarily through his head, and he gulped down a pulpy knot of anxiety. If I grow another arm because of this…

But he never even got touch it, because the doors smacked open with a foggy burst of that colored smoke, and a voice suddenly shrieked up from inside the thing.

“Well! That was a crash-landing if I ever saw one!” A man, seemingly a British one, was shouting from somewhere inside the box. He sounded dazed and distant, and Sam stumbled back in surprise, landing on his backside with a decidedly ungraceful grunt and arm-flail.

There was a silence. Then–

“Is that someone out there?” The voice paused, and Sam could have sworn he heard a loud splash. “D’you think you could give a fellow a hand? I think the library’s in the pool again, and I can’t really climb up through Biographies without muddying up Agatha Christie and William Shakespeare, and that would just ruin me! They were both so pleasant last we spoke!”

If Sam was functioning normally, and not staring wide-eyed and fast-hearted at the innocently open doors, he would have rolled his eyes. He could practically hear the exclamation marks in the man’s excited speech.

“Uh,” he said instead, shifting on his butt. “You squished my vegetable garden.”

A scrabbling noise. A crash.

“AHA! Found my grappling hook. Oh, dear, did I land somewhere offensive? Terribly sorry. Thought I got my dates right.” A sound of rope whizzing. Sam clambered to his feet, only to topple back into Jess as a large iron hook jerked from the doors, and landed on the muddy ground with a whump and a drag. “Right, I’m on my way up. See you in a mo’!”

The problem with Sam Winchester was that he wasn’t very patient. 

So when he peered down into the blue box, leaning his tall frame probably a bit too far over that sideways threshold, he may have fallen in a bit. 

A bit meaning straight down, shouting and flailing. He expected to hit the back wall, maybe the owner of the voice, but instead he plummeted for an unnerving forty three seconds, before his hand found a chunk of rope in a dash of luck and he hung on for his dear life.

“Oi!” The voice was back. “Did you think I was pulling your leg about those biographies? What d’you think Will’s going to say when I pop in for a jammy dodger and I’ve got spoilers stuck on my shoe? He’ll bring the witches back, he will!” 

Sam’s mind had stopped working properly. He could feel his fingers sliding ominously down the rope, fraction by fraction, and he could hear Jess’ sharp, worried barks from high above him, but besides that there was nothing.

Nothing, that is, except the inside of the blue box.

Which was big. Terrifyingly big. Impossibly and wonderfully big. He was in some sort of a library, bookshelves tall and mahogany and reaching far into corners of a room he couldn’t see the end of. Thousands of books littered the place, mismatched and colorful and (Sam realized with a flicker of shock) tumbling into a large indoor pool.

“You’ve even missed the control room,” the voice was saying sadly, from just below and to the right of Sam. “I like when they go in there. They say the thing. I love the thing.” Now he sounded vaguely exasperated. “Oh, but you had to go whizzing down a corridor the wrong way up, didn’t you? I apologized about the vegetables. You could’ve just waited for me.”

“How...how…” Sam’s mouth was also not working. He felt his palms slip on the rope a bit, and the rough jerk down shocked him back into order. “How the fuck?”

The voice sighed. There was the sound of paper and fabric rustling, and then another wet splash.

“Well, there goes Will,” the voice sighed again, this time much closer to Sam. “Anyway, it’s called a trans-spacial shift. I’ll explain it if you let go of my grappling hook. Batman gave me that at Comic Con. Will give me that at Comic Con. I think. When are we?”

Sam decided it was time he met the voice. He screwed up his eyes, and, ignoring the desperate screeching of his nerves, let go of the rope.

And landed on his feet barely a foot down.

“See?” The voice said, from behind him. “Not bad.”

Sam whirled around. He half-expected something from one of his visions, one of those black-eyes that haunted him and followed him like lovesick flies. Maybe a sharp-toothed monster (he saw those once or twice) with a funny British voice. 

Instead, he came face-to-face with the most brilliant smile he’d ever seen. More brilliant than Ruby’s the day after the wedding (and the day after the divorce). More brilliant than his mother’s at his high school graduation. The owner of the voice was tall. Not Sam tall, but tall-ish, with dark bangs and pale green eyes that didn’t fit his face at all. Odd eyes. Things behind them, Sam thought, things that far outweighed the outward appearance of their owner.

Who wore a tweed jacket and a rather ridiculous red bowtie that Sam found himself staring incredulously at as he tried to balance on a stack of particularly thick biographies.

“Hello!” The man suddenly shouted excitedly, as if he wasn’t standing just in front of Sam. “I’m the Doctor, and I don't belong here.”


	2. The Boy Who Stopped Time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the Doctor is a magician, Sam doesn't have tea, and a mighty sound is finally silenced.

"It starts with a spark, a breath and a moment of still,  
A flicker, a glow, as the oxygen spills through a delta of spindles and stone,  
Kindled from nothing in a whisper of smoke"

-"A Fire On A Hill" // Hands Like Houses

...

The Doctor hadn’t meant to do it–but then, he never really did. These things happen, he told himself, as the TARDIS hurtled towards the Earth below with a bellow of upset. So he got stuck in a parallel universe, without so much as a Pond to accompany him. So he happened to land in the backyard of a human so choked by destiny that it was hard for the Doctor to even say his name without cringing. So the library fell into the pool again.

These things happened, didn’t they?

The problem with the Doctor was that he was a terrible old optimist.

“D’you have any tea?” he asked cheerfully, as Sam helped him reel up the grappling hook. They’d reached the garden after a few painfully tepid moments of silence, in which Sam looked ready to be sick and the Doctor found himself a curious mixture of guilty and confused. He disliked the dull, dark feeling in his stomach. It meant nothing good, and he forced the smile back on his face with the last shred of his patience. “I could do with a good cup right about now. This old girl isn’t exactly Virgin Airlines,” he patted the TARDIS doors with an affectionate chuckle, and She hummed feebly.

Sam Winchester stood (awkward and disproportioned in his muddy floral rain boots) between two flattened cucumber beds, and stared at Doctor as if he were on fire.

“I’m not giving you anything,” he said, folding his arms across his chest with a hint of petulant gruffness. “Until you explain to me how the Hell you flew that...thing...into my garden. And why it’s bigger on the inside.”

Oh, thought the Doctor, a bit more bitter than he intended. Now you say it. But it hit him then–this wasn’t the same Sam Winchester he had heard great stories about. This was not the correct Sam Winchester.

“See,” he said, letting his careful facade slip just long enough to run an anxious hand through his bangs. “I’m a...a magician . A travelling one. Got separated from my friends in the circus. And this…” he gestured towards where the TARDIS lay, Her doors still open and the sound of her engines still damp and weary. “This is my best trick. Optical illusion...boxy...thing. Sexy thing, she is,”

Sam drank it all in with a straight face. He was young, the Doctor saw, no stress lines of scars on his face. Yes, this was definitely not the Sam he had heard tell of. Which meant that this Earth was…

“Well,” Sam interrupted his cloudy thoughts with a clearing of his throat and a weak gesture towards the house. “Not the weirdest story I’ve heard. And you’re not a serial killer so far as I can tell, so I guess you can come in.”

The Doctor blinked. It was never that easy. Not the first time (discrediting Amy, of course, but a Pond was a Pond). 

“No doubting? No shouting and flapping about? No vehement declarations of complete and utter confusion?” the Doctor grinned. “I like you, Sam Winchester, I like you a lot.”

If Sam had any qualms with the stranger in his garden knowing his name (or calling him a human like the Doctor wasn’t one himself) he did not say so. Instead, he started up the narrow, pleasant path towards a back porch complete with a swinging chair and a tipped-over, dusty umbrella holder. 

“I haven’t got tea,” he called over his shoulder to the Doctor. “I mean, the only person who really visits is my brother, and all he drinks is cheap beer, but…” he trailed off, and peered behind him with an eyebrow raised. “Something tells me you aren’t really a booze-and-football kind of guy.”

The Doctor forced the icy worm of worry in his throat back down into his stomach, and hurried up the beaten wooden steps after Sam, adjusting his bowtie as he went.

“Oh, coffee will do for me,” he said, pausing to poke the umbrella holder with a toe. “Although I have been known to play a little football. Lovely game. I’ve got a friend who’s a footballer, though I suppose he’s in a parallel universe to you.”

They went into the house through a narrow screen door, and the Doctor found himself in a sunny, pleasantly warm sitting room. There was a pair of plush leather chairs arranged in one corner, and a small television on a wooden stand just across from them. The Doctor noticed the yellow walls were grimly bare, however–Sam was not a decadent man.

“D’you mind taking off your shoes?” he was saying, kicking off his own boots. I just got the carpet cleaned, and your shoes are kinda wet, so. If you don’t mind.”

“‘Course not.” The Doctor was barely listening to Sam. He found himself wandering automatically towards the TV’s wooden stand where, he noticed, a small picture frame was balanced. “Could I get that coffee, though? All that tumbling through time and space gave me a bit of a headache.”

He gave Sam what he hoped was a winning smile. The American stood awkwardly in

in the doorway for a moment, before nodding. 

“Yeah,” he said, starting off up another flight of stairs. “Yeah, I’ll be right back. Make yourself at home. “

Once he was sure he was alone, the Doctor bounced forward to snatch the picture frame from the stand, whipping out his screwdriver as he did so. He was going to have to be careful here. He knew he couldn’t lie forever, and he didn’t exactly blend in, so Sam Winchester really was his best bet at finding out when and where the TARDIS had landed him this time.

Always taking me where I need to go, she said, he thought incredulously, as he tapped his screwdriver with a forefinger. Fat lot of good that did me this time.

The photograph was of a family, sat on the hood of an antique car with four identical grins. There were two children–one a boy of maybe three or four, with a crop of dark blonde hair and round cheeks, and the other a baby of no more than six months old, wrapped cozy in his mother’s arms. A dark-haired man had his arms wrapped around the mother’s waist, and a broad, grainy palm on his elder son’s shoulder. The Doctor squinted at their blurry faces. They looked happy. He could suddenly hear his heartbeats loud in his ears. They looked happy, but the picture was so, so wrong.

And then he knew.

Mary Winchester. On a warm, windy night in November, she would wake up. Turn on the light. Check on her son. She would never go back to sleep. 

Dual-pulses racing, the Doctor quickly flipped the picture over, scrabbling at the back latch to tear the photograph from it’s worn frame. There, written on the back of the faded white paper, was a date.

November 3, 1983. Somewhere in the back of his mind, somewhere buried under centuries and centuries of color-faded memories, he could see a map of fixed points in time like a diamond display, glittering wickedly under his mind’s watchful eye. The Titanic. World War II. JFK’s assassination.

The death of Mary Winchester. 

Filed neatly under November 2, 1983. Killed by the Yellow-Eyed Demon while her youngest son drank blood and her husband slept in the dying light of a TV gameshow. Her house rocking with Fate and flames as she burned silent and alone, pinned to the ceiling like a common butterfly under a microscope.

She was doomed to die, her death a certainty in history. If she didn’t, everything changed–the future, the present, the past. The entire Universe.

The Doctor put the picture back with shaking hands. The dull lead in his stomach–he knew what it meant now. He knew why the TARDIS had dragged him here, crashing headfirst into the backyard of a man who shouldn’t be. 

Because someone had changed the most important fixed point in the history of the world.

“But who? Who could’ve...I certainly didn’t, and I’m the only one who…” the Doctor clenched a fist to his head and twirled on the carpet, frustration leaking into his veins as if leapt from a broken faucet. “Ooooh, c’mon now, think! Think! I’m the only one left, there’s no one but me to…”

Except for Him, said a cold, careful voice at the back of his head. The Timelord that time itself forgot. The one you, foolish old man, thought to be dead.

And even as Sam’s footsteps came thumping back down the stairs and the photograph was still clenched in his fist and his hearts screamed wildly against his ribs, he whispered His name. It was odd and bitter on his new tongue, cold in a way it hadn’t ever been before. Fear, he realized. His name is laced with fear.

“Master.”

....

NOVEMBER 2, 1983  
LAWRENCE, KANSAS

It was gray in this world. He could feel it around him even as He was blind as a newborn, hands groping senselessly at all the Nothing around Him. There were colors, yes, but they were drained and lifeless, cool to His wandering touch. He did not like this world. 

It was better than Death, though. Death was nothing. No, that wasn’t quite right–Death wasn’t nothing. Death was the complete lack of everything at all. No darkness, no light, no fury and no calm. No color and no absence either.

And He had clawed and fought, snarled into the lack with a voice He did not have until He had made it, until He had come through to this other world, this bland Earthly one of humans and Angels and black-eyed demons who lived underground.

It was gray, but it was just so interesting. He’d awoken on a house porch, the wood splintered and wonderfully solid under His aching palms. Above Him, a porchlight choked and flickered, and He relished that soupy yellow light on His eyes, lips pulled back in an unconscious smile. He was here. He existed again.

The house wasn’t empty–there was a man asleep in front of a television, and He could hear the bleating heartbeats of children through the floorboards above Him. Careful of His (wonderfully, painfully real) footsteps, He headed up the stairs, head spinning giddily. There was something very…cold...in this house. It sent excited shivers down a spine He hadn’t remembered having. He climbed the stairs slowly, savoring the taste. On a whim, He tapped the hall light as He went. It flickered once, before glowing brighter than it had before. He felt an unknown power in His blood, and it tasted like euphoria and smoke.

He found the child’s room at the end of the hall. The door ajar, that sickly cold coming from the soft light inside like a virus, a lovely virus that made Him shiver and smile and reach towards the threshold with anxious feet.

The child in the crib was barely old enough to blink, it’s wide hazel eyes glossy. He disliked children, especially the human-kind. Human, He thought. Something I am not. So full of life. He grinned. 

“Hush, hush,” He whispered, reaching out a finger to brush over the child’s shiny forehead. “So much life in you.” The child cooed, and fell silent. The sound was loud in His ears.

Oh, and He knew now. He knew why He could feel everything, why He could hear everything around Him loud as a siren and clear as a bell. Why His thoughts were pure and tall like they had never been before.

Because now His head was filled with a lovely sort of silence. 

Just then, there was a flurry of smoke. Besides the child’s crib, a column of it grew from the floorboards, solidifying into a vaguely humanoid shape that He watched with wide eyes. The child began it’s pitiful bleating again, and He shushed it absently with a single touch. 

The smoke-man’s eyes blinked mournfully at Him, the same soupy yellow as the porchlight outside. He almost drowned in all that yellow, all that color. He almost did, but He didn’t. This smoke-man was the source of the cold. This smoke-man did not belong here.

“Leave this place,” He whispered, and His voice was warm and familiar on His throat. “Leave, or I will kill you.”

The smoke-man smiled. A ghostly, white-toothed smile, stretching pale across its shadowed face.

“Timelord,” it hissed. “I’d thought you were all dead.”

Double hearts twinged. He crushed His own lips into a cruel smile.

“Not me,” He said. “I won’t die. Not now. Not when I’ve found such an interesting place.” He glanced down at the child, silent and stirring in its blankets. It stared back. “Oh, I think I’ll like it here.”

The smoke-man did not reply. Instead, it leapt forward, a glint of a knife in its dark fist. He easily snapped to the side, and the smoke-man stopped in its attack to turn, slowly, on its heels. It blinked those yellow eyes again, then suddenly collapsed, slurping backwards into the floorboards from whence it had come.

But it was not gone–no, He could hear it twisting beneath him, curling and cackling. Then it was behind Him again, the knife out and the teeth glinting, but–

But He had it. He had it by the heart. He tightened His fist around the smoke-filled muscle, relishing the cold, chalky blood around his fingers. The smoke-man choked out a sob, suddenly more solid than it had been before. Its fingers scrabbled desperately at His, and He licked His lips with a smile.

“I’m back,” He laughed. “Such a good feeling. I think I’ll kill you, smoke-man.”

And He did. 

He could feel its life-force squeezing from its flimsy human shape like toothpaste from a tube, dripping between His fingers and down below. Not to the bottom floor of the house. Not even to the Earth. Somewhere much farther, he knew. The smoke-man would never come back.

The child was crying again. He turned to it, that lovely silence filling His head and leaking out His hearts and His skin. He bent over the wooden railings, and pressed His lips to the child’s red cheek.

“You’ll thank me one day,” He cooed, almost lovingly. “All of you. You’ll thank me and call me your God and you will never hear the sounds I’ve heard.”

He moved to leave. Then–

“Remember my name,” He whispered in the child’s ear. “Remember me. I am the Master.”

And then He was gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note on using "He" instead of "he" for the Master:  
> It'll come back into play later, but for now, it's simply to personify him without a name.  
> Thanks.  
> -TextbookEnigmatic


	3. Knock Knock

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam makes a phone call, Dean finds he dislikes surprises, and someone comes knocking for the Doctor's attention.

“You know a part about life

Is just a waking dream

Well I know what you mean

But that ain't how it seems right here, right now.”

-”The Good Soldier” // Nine Inch Nails

…

Sam checked to make sure “the Doctor” was still downstairs and out of earshot before reaching for the kitchen wall phone. He took down two dusty mugs from the cabinet and filled them with hot water from the sink and punched in the number on the phone.

It took an agonizing thirty seconds to ring. He could hear his strange new visitor saying something to himself downstairs, and he tapped his foot impatiently against the cool tile floor.

“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon,”

There was a muffled click on the other end of the phone.

“Hullo?”

“Dean!” Sam couldn’t help it–he broke into a wide smile. “Dean, I–well, it’s nice to hear you, first off.”

A shuffle on the other line. A cough, and the soft undertones of another, more feminine voice in the background. Sam felt a surge of annoyance under the initial affection.

“Do you have someone over, Dean?”

“Yeah, as a matter of fact I do. And it’s Lisa, you little snoop, so don’t be all pissy. Now what do you want?” Dean hissed on the other end.

“Uh-huh. I’m doing well too, thanks for asking, jerk,” Sam rolled his eyes, and poured a bit too much hot water into the mug he’d pulled down for the Doctor. 

“Ha-ha. Now get down to it. Lisa’s making me cook.”

“Whoa, whoa,” for a moment, Sam forgot the stranger hanging out in his basement, and he let out a cackle. “You? Mr. Love-’em, Leave-’em, douchebag? On an actual date?”

Dean sounded distantly indignant. Sam could practically see his shoulders square defensively. 

“Yeah? So? Fuck you, Sam. I’ve changed.”

“Not according to Charlie you haven’t”

“Charlie’s emotionally compromised. She likes you. And your hot neighbor. So lose the attitude, sasquatch, and spill,” he paused, and Sam raked a handful of coffee grinds into the mug without looking. “I’ve got half a burnt turkey in the oven and about ten seconds before Lisa breaks up with me because I ruined her last casserole dish.”

The Doctor was calling Sam’s name from downstairs. He could hear him starting up the stairs, loud and fast. Could the man even control his own limbs? Sam shushed Dean quickly, and shoved a coffee filter in his own cup.

“Look, just get here as fast as you can, okay? I dunno, bring Lisa if you have to. I need your help. There’s someone here who really shouldn’t be, and I can’t explain it.”

“Sam, what–”

Sam hung up just as the Doctor skidded into the kitchen, looking white (well, whiter than a dorky-looking British guy usually looked). 

Sam put on an innocent smile, and shoved the still-unfinished cup of coffee towards the Doctor, who took it without looking at it. His green eyes (which were really quite nice, Sam thought begrudgingly) were wild, unfocused.

“Sam Winchester,” he said, taking a hurried sip of the coffee, freezing, then spitting it back out into the cup and shoving it back to Sam with his tongue still out. “We have to go. Now. You’re in danger.”

Sam forced his heart rate down. This was what people always said, wasn’t it? Don’t feed the animals, don’t take candy from strangers, don’t let oddly dressed foreign weirdos into your house. This is it, he thought miserably, his own coffee gone cold in his hand. I’m going to die, right here. He’s probably a serial killer.

“Why?” Sam asked instead. The Doctor rubbed a hand over his eyes, and rocked back on his feet.

“Because I know why you’re all wrong and…” he waved a hand towards Sam. “...wibbly! I know who made you, made this whole wrong, wibbly place!”

Definitely a serial killer.

“I thought you were a magician,” Sam replied, forcing a lump of dejected, wet panic down his throat. 

The Doctor nodded violently. 

“Oh, yes. Yes, of course I am! Great magician,” he paused to dash over to kitchen window, leaning on his tip-toes over the sink to yank back the curtain and peer outside. “Well, sort of. Actually, not at all. I lied. Do that a lot.”

Sam rolled his eyes, and took a sip of his coffee. It tasted awful, and he quickly put it back down. 

“Oh, well, you’re great at it,” he said loudly, pushing the Doctor away from the window and dropping the discarded mugs in the sink. “I didn’t see that one coming at all.”

“This is no time for sarcasm, Sam Winchester!” The Doctor’s voice was getting higher and higher, and he started to pace. It was making Sam nervous. When was Dean going to get here, anyway? “This is serious! You need to get out, or we’ll all be killed, or worse.”

“No,” Sam said it as loudly and firmly as he possibly could. This was getting ridiculous. “No, I think you should get out, ‘Doctor’. I don’t even know who you are. You just...crashed, or whatever, in my freaking backyard like some kind of cliché Martian, babbling on about how wrong I am and how much danger I’m in, and then you expect me to let you in here to spill your weird psycho crap?” He laughed bitterly, and crossed his arms over his chest. “I don’t think so. I’ve seen the movies. You’re either some harmless wackadoo or you’re an escaped mental patient, so tell me which and then toodle-loo on back to your ‘magic box’, okay?”

The Doctor went still. The light from outside filtered through the open kitchen curtains, and though his eyes were framed in a young face, Sam thought they looked suddenly very old. 

“You don’t know anything,” the Doctor said, softly, without moving. He sounded distantly sad. “You really don’t know anything.”

“What? What does that mean?” Sam didn’t fight the frustration creeping into his voice this time. He scrubbed a hand over his jaw, and sighed. “Know what?”

But the Doctor wasn’t listening. He was heading back downstairs, one hand digging in his tweed jacket pocket for something. There was no more quirky, madcap glee. He was solemn as the grave. Sam didn’t follow him.

When he came back up a moment later, he was wearing his shoes, and carrying what looked like a metal tube topped with a green, blinking light and a few knobs. He ignored Sam’s raised eyebrow, heading towards the front door.

The Doctor had a hand on the doorknob before Sam realized what was happening.

“Wait a minute,” he blurted out, jogging over to the door and holding it shut with one broad hand. “Wait, you can’t go–you haven’t even told me anything.”

The Doctor’s mouth quirked into a dry, sad smile. He wasn’t looking at Sam though. Well, he was, but not like he could see Sam at all. More like he was looking through Sam, around him.

“I’m sorry, Sam Winchester,” he said, gently pushing the door open. “I’m so, so sorry.”

He turned to leave.

And came face to face with Dean.

There was an awkward moment, as Dean raised an eyebrow at the Doctor, Sam groaned wearily, and the Doctor’s eyes flicked between them with a spark of recognition.

“Oh!” He shouted, suddenly, that first excitement back in his voice. “Oh, you must be Dean! Marvelous! I’ve been dying to meet you! Well, both of you, but it seems Sam’s a bit off from what I was expecting. Where’s your husband? I’ve always wanted to meet a celestial wavelength!”

Dean took a step back, a look of vague panic across his face. He frowned

“Who the fuck are you?”

“Dean? D’you want me to grab the turkey?” Lisa’s voice floated from somewhere across the front lawn, and Sam couldn’t help but let out a smug smirk as Dean’s face reddened, and he shifted uncomfortably. 

“That’s, uh…” he jerked a thumb brusquely over his shoulder. “That’s my girlfriend. Lisa. She wanted to meet you, Sam, and…”

He was interrupted by the Doctor pushing him rudely out of the way, metal stick thingy waving in front of him as he flitted across the lawn.

“Oh, no no no!” The Doctor was shouting, spinning in a circle to fix Dean with a disappointed glare. “No, this is not right! You are not supposed to be with her, Dean Winchester! What happened to that profound bond? What happened to Cas?”

“Cas?” Dean stormed across the lawn, shoving the case of beer he’d been holding into Sam’s arms without looking at him. Great, Sam thought, bitterly. This is going so great. “I don’t know any Cas. And I’m not gay. And who the Hell are you, Mr…” he eyed the Doctor’s outfit with a disgusted look.

“Doctor,” the Doctor said, with a smile, sticking his hand towards Dean. “The Doctor.”

“Doctor who?”

“Ooh, he said the thing! Why didn’t you say the thing, Sam Winchester?”

“Hold on–Sam, you know this crazy-ass?”

“Crazy-ass? Americans, honestly! You’d’ve thought the last Apocalypse would’ve sorted you out, though I suppose you haven’t gotten to that one either.”

“Shut up, Tea Party! And stop waving that oversized pencil in my face, you weirdo.”

“It’s not a pencil, it’s a sonic screwdriver, and I’m not any more weird than you. You’re put together all wrong, that’s what you are–”

Sam had had enough. He dropped the beer case with a loud smack of damp cardboard on cement stoop. The Doctor and Dean, now glaring at each other only inches apart on the lawn, turned to stare at him with freakishly identical looks of ruffled indignation.

“Dean,” Sam said grindingly. “Meet the Doctor. Doctor, this is my brother, Dean.”

….

Dean Winchester had seen a lot of strange in his short existence on the mortal coil. When he was a child, he’d convinced himself that the nightmares his younger brother was plagued with constantly were just figments of an overly active mind, and not real in the slightest. As an adult, he tried to convince himself that the fact that he sometimes saw strange things out of the corner of his eye, or woke up with a memory that didn’t quite fit, was due merely to the fact that he had taken up drinking at a decidedly young age.

But now, faced with a really quite odd man on his brother’s lawn (carrying a metal wand, to boot) telling him he was put together all wrong, Dean Winchester couldn’t help but feel uneasy. In fact, he felt downright terrified. Because he did feel wrong. He had felt wrong since the night Sammy had turned six months old.

“The Doctor?” He spluttered, after Sam’s hasty introduction. “What kind of shit name is that?”

The man called the Doctor looked downtrodden. He scratched the back of his neck, and shot Sam a mournful look.

“It’s not that bad, is it?”

Sam shrugged. 

“Could be worse. You could be, like, John Smith, or something.”

Dean couldn’t help it–he started to laugh. Both Sam and “the Doctor” spun to stare at him, eyes wide, one with frustrated confusion, the other with sheepish indignation.

“Seriously, Sammy?” He paused to stretch his neck back, shaking his head. “Oh, this is just fan-fucking-tastic!”

He jabbed a finger at the car behind him, and took a step towards Sam. His brother looked a bit panicked.

“I get a call from you all worried and hush-hush, tellin’ me to come here quick as I can,” Dean poked Sam’s chest, a bit of bitter anger flaring in his own ribcage. “Because something’s wrong, and you need me to fix it. So I go as fast as I can, even though I’ve got the freaking love of my life in the backseat,”

“Oh, she’s definitely not the love of your life,” the Doctor scoffed. Dean fixed him with a venomous glare.

“Shut your pie hole, Tea Party, I ain’t done with you,” he snarled, before turning back to the white-faced Sam. “And I get here–which is a big step for me, I might add–and all you’re doing is hanging out with this nutjob? Seriously?”

Before Sam could answer, there was a sound.

Thump.

Thump.

Thump.

Thump.

Lisa had started to open the door of the car, a look of confusion on her face. Sam was still silent, his mouth open in a wide, slack, ‘o’. The Doctor, however, had gone very pale. Dean Winchester felt a feeling in his gut he hadn’t felt in over thirty years, a feeling he couldn’t quite place. His feet were suddenly cold, rooted to the neat green grass of the lawn. His ears itched with something, something very, very unpleasant, something–

“Do you hear that?” The Doctor whispered. He took a tentative step forward, his metal wand lowered. Swallowed. “Did anyone else hear that...sound?”

Thump.

Thump.

Thump.

Thump.

It was coming from behind Sam’s house.

The Doctor suddenly burst into a run, careening around the white clapboard porch, disappearing around the side of the house. Dean glanced back at Sam, still rooted the spot, but now staring after the Doctor with a furrowed brow. Concern, Dean realized, with a twinge in his head. That look was concern.

“What’s going on, Dean?” Lisa’s hand slipped cold and dry into his. The feeling in his gut was starting to feel like a poisonous fish, slapping its tail against his stomach.

“Lisa,” he grabbed her shoulders urgently, unsure exactly why he did. “Lisa, listen–get in the car. If we don’t come back in ten minutes…” he glanced at Sam. Sam nodded, once. “Then drive. Drive away. Call Charlie Bradbury, tell her to come here. Just don’t follow us, okay?”

Lisa’s face was stiff with hesitant fear. But she nodded, slowly, and broke away from Dean, backing towards the car.

“Okay,” she said, unsteady. “Okay.”

They waited until she was in the driver’s seat. And then they ran after the Doctor.

And as Dean’s legs pumped and his heart raced and the acid feeling in his stomach churned and churned, he felt more right than he ever had before.

The feeling in his gut was adrenaline.

Dean Winchester found that he liked it.

…

He’d known the minute he heard it. Like a heartbeat. Like an executioner’s knoll. Like footsteps, like rain beats. Like drumbeats.

Like knocking on a door.

The Doctor ran faster than he’d ran in a long time. Skidding around the back fence, jumping past Sam’s golden retriever, dashing through the thicket of failed vegetable gardens. His lungs were screaming.

But when he reached the crater where the TARDIS was, the Doctor had enough air for one more word.

“How...?” he breathed.

The man standing in front of his TARDIS rapped his knuckles against the dark blue wood, and cast the Doctor a very white smile.

Thump.

Thump.

Thump.

Thump.  
“Doctor,” the Master said, after a moment. “I almost didn’t recognize you.”

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you liked the first round. It'll have some better humor later on (if I can manage), a whole lot of existential angst, some sad reunions, and a good dosage of romance. Oh, and a suspicious amount of background characters and ships that'll probably only be mentioned once or twice but I kept because I love them so.  
> I'll shut up for the rest of the story. You have a good day.  
> -TextbookEnigmatic


End file.
